The Book of Getting Even

by Benjamin Taylor (Steerforth; $23.95)

Gabriel Geismar, the embattled protagonist of Taylor’s excellent second novel, is the son of a domineering rabbi growing up in nineteen-fifties New Orleans. Homosexual, suffering from a physical deformity (he has a supernumerary thumb), and enthralled by mathematics—“calculability, sweet detachment from the corporeal universe”—Gabriel has “a furious craving for other, nobler origins.” In college, he meets Marghie and Danny Hundert, whose famous physicist father is one of his heroes, and adopts the family as his own. The book explores the tortured and often misguided process by which children attempt to define themselves in relation to their parents (one iteration of the “getting even” of the title), a process from which Danny and Marghie, as Gabriel slowly discovers, are not exempt. Taylor captures their quests for identity in pitch-perfect dialogue and lengthy meditative passages; his elegant plotting feels at once deliberate and improvised. ♦